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while there are many reasons to be pleased about obama's having been elected--not least of which is that it puts a definitive period at the end of the sentence of fascism-lite that has been floating around the states since september 2001--sooner or later relations to him, and by extension to the united states to the extent these are shaped by the person of the president, will tip into being conditioned by what his administration does rather than by who obama himself is.
carrying on a rational policy toward iran, for example, could go a long way toward enabling the americans to extricate quickly from the debacle in iraq, since iran has a definite interest in regional stability...ahmadinejad has been politically weak as president and has used the bush administration's nitwit policies to prop himself up, much in the way that the khomeni aspects of the iranian revolution used the signifier of the united states as an aspect of their campaign to change the revolution and stabilize themselves at its head--so the shift may at one level pose a problem, but i doubt seriously that will prevent anything--at this point, i suspect that ahmadinejad would try to spin a shift into negociation with obama as a demonstration of the success of his actions relative to cowboy george, but who cares?
obviously the critical regional question will be american policy toward israel and palestine. on this, i think obama is in an advantageous position initially because frankly almost anything he does short of replication will be an improvement over the catastrophe that has been the bush administration's policy, which is in significant measure responsible for the appalling situation in gaza. there is an interesting opening that turned up last week: olmert, on his way out the door, cut off state funding (which was not suppsed to exist in the first place, but you know how these things are) to the settlements in the west bank. it remains to be seen how long this window stays open, but a forward looking policy from the states would use it to attempt to force a change with respect to the settlements. these are the primary obstacles to any coherent arrangement, the primary reasons for the continuation of the occupation in its brutal routinised form.
i would hope that obama participates in a forward looking manner in the reshaping of globalizing capitalism away from what it's been---an expression of american hegemony--toward something more equitable. but i don't know if that'll happen---mutation is under way and it's hard to say which of many directions it'll take in the end. the model that is falling apart--the neoliberal model--was a generator of opposition.
over the past few years, there's been lots of rightwing ink spilled in trying to make "anti-american" into a substantive category. that simplifies the world for conservatives, makes it over into their own image. it lets american actions and policies off the hook by attributing an essence to a category that exists largely in the collective imagination of the neo-con set and which derives more from the nature of nouns than from anything in the empirical world. it is useless, though, the category. not only does it depoliticise *political* opposition, but it groups phenomena together in a superficial, stupid, self-defeating way. such moves have been characteristic of the world a la neo-con, and the consequences of this are self-evident if you look around (think iraq)....
there will undoubtedly be opposition, and there should be opposition, not only internationally but domestically as well. but the opposition is particular and political, not an expression of some floating general essence. and it happens in response to actions and policies, not because "they" don't like "us"---so another effect of putting a period at the end of the sentence may be the abandonment of a stupid, debilitating view of not only the world but of american power in the world.
but we'll see how things play out.
i am not one of the folk who is smitten with who obama is. i want to see his administration and get an idea of what he's going to do. then we'll talk.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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